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I am thrilled to share updated Tailscale implementations for jailbroken Kindles that unlock powerful new capabilities. These improvements include default SSH access, a proxy mode for apps like KOReader to reach Calibre servers, and full TUN mode support on select devices. This community-driven code transforms your e-reader into a versatile thin client, allowing seamless connectivity across your tailnet for reading, syncing, and even remote management.
"Is there a pleasant warmth, knowing that you've added the least likely thin client to your what-if kit?"
Exploring the Quirky User Interfaces of the Demo SceneI explore the unique and often peculiar user interfaces created by the demo scene community, focusing on tools for the Amiga and other platforms. From Elite Sinus Producer to various music trackers like ProTracker and disk copiers like X-Copy, these tools reflect a blend of teenage experimentation and technical necessity. The article highlights how these creative nerds built their own utilities, sometimes from scratch, to achieve impressive real-time effects and manage complex coding tasks.
"The Amiga, like most other home computers, had no memory protection, and demo coding is a notoriously crash-prone activity."
I am introducing Codex Security, an open-source CLI and TypeScript SDK designed to find, validate, and review security issues in your code. This tool supports macOS, Linux, and Windows, requiring Node.js and Python for full functionality. You can scan repositories you own or have permission to assess, integrate with CI/CD pipelines, and export findings in various formats like SARIF and JSON. It also offers bulk scanning capabilities via Docker for large-scale operations.
"Scan only repositories you own or have explicit permission to assess."
HNewhere - Lightweight userscript for inline Hacker News discussionsHNewhere is a lightweight userscript that seamlessly integrates Hacker News discussions directly into any article page. By automatically detecting relevant HN stories, it loads comments into a customizable, resizable sidebar, eliminating the need to open multiple tabs. This tool enhances the reading experience by allowing users to browse community insights and reply links without ever leaving the original content. Compatible with popular managers like Tampermonkey and Violentmonkey, HNewhere leverages the Hacker News API and Algolia search to deliver a streamlined, efficient workflow for tech enthusiasts and developers.
"HNewhere detects Hacker News stories, loads comments into a sidebar, and lets you browse discussions without leaving the page."
Cracking Windows Open: Porting RADV to Win32We are porting RADV, the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs, from Linux to Windows. Building on Faith Ekstrand's reverse-engineering work, we achieved native support and successfully ran Counter-Strike 2. While challenges like compiler differences and undocumented interfaces remain, this effort aims to create a shared codebase for faster debugging and community contributions across operating systems.
"It's such an improbable proposition that we might actually get there faster than light (spoiler alert: that's going to be a little slower)."
Andrew Ng's LearnVector: AI-Powered One-to-One Learning ExperiencesI am launching LearnVector to transform education from one-to-many to one-to-one using AI. With a $100 million investment from Coursera, we are building a trustworthy guide that plans personalized paths and adapts to how you learn. Unlike unguarded chatbots that cause cognitive offloading, our system patiently stays with you until you master new skills, ensuring learning is engaging, daily, and effective.
"Conventional wisdom says AI will replace people. I believe the opposite."
Substack Writers, You Need a Website: Stop Renting Your Digital HomeI argue that Substack should serve as a distribution tool, not your primary digital home. Relying entirely on platforms like Twitter or Medium makes you a tenant rather than a homeowner, leaving your work vulnerable to corporate rule changes. Instead, adopt the POSSE method: publish on your own site first, then syndicate elsewhere. This approach ensures long-term visibility and protects your creative sovereignty against algorithmic shifts.
"When you build your audience entirely on someone else's platform, you aren't a homeowner. You are a tenant. Or worse, a digital sharecropper."
Transformer Transformer: A Unified Model for Motion-Conditioned Robot Co-DesignI introduce Transformer Transformer, a unified model that designs complete robots optimized for specific tasks from simple motion demonstrations. Using RoboTokens and a diffusion architecture, the system generates every link, joint, and motor property while simultaneously validating the design through control. Our approach, Dynamics Self-Guidance, allows for zero-shot optimization of unseen rewards, significantly improving performance over traditional evolutionary baselines.
"You can collect all the tossing data in the world, but if your robot's shape is far from optimal, it might toss itself instead of the ball."
I am thrilled to share that Half-Life has finally been ported to PowerPC-based Macintosh computers running Mac OS 9. GitHub user doctashay achieved this by forking the Xash3D FWGS engine, making the game playable from start to finish. This release includes the original game plus Blue Shift and Opposing Force, supporting G3 and G4 machines, though performance depends heavily on your GPU's VRAM.
"This is a huge achievement for the Macintosh gaming community, and doctashay deserves considerable credit for the work involved in bringing Half-Life to the PowerPC platform."
ReFrame: An Open Source ePaper Camera for Deliberate PhotographyI built reFrame, an experimental camera using a color ePaper display to capture one photo at a time. Each image takes 15 seconds to appear, creating a deliberate experience similar to a digital Polaroid. The device uses off-the-shelf components like a Raspberry Pi Zero and is fully open source, allowing anyone to build their own. Photos remain on the screen even when powered off, turning the camera into a permanent desk frame until the next shot is taken.
"The only way to clear the screen is to take a new photo."
Kimi K3 Architecture: A 2.8T Open-Weight Model with Native Multimodal SupportI break down the Kimi K3 architecture, the largest open-weight model at 2.8T parameters. It scales up the Kimi Linear design with new LatentMoE components and attention residuals for better efficiency. Notably, it replaces all RoPE layers with NoPE and introduces native multimodal support, marking a significant step forward in frontier-level model design.
"Interestingly, Kimi K3 got rid of all RoPE layers and uses NoPE everywhere instead, making it the first frontier-level architecture to do so."
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years: Why Rushing to Learn Code FailsI argue that true programming expertise cannot be achieved in 24 hours or even 21 days, but requires a decade of deliberate practice. Drawing on research from Bloom and Ericsson, I suggest that mastery comes from sustained effort, learning multiple languages, and working on real projects with others rather than relying on quick tutorials or formal degrees alone.
"Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter."
Truth Is Not a Direction: Why LLM Probes Cannot Capture TruthI explore why no probe on a language model's embedding space can definitively pin down truth. Drawing on Tarski's undefinability theorem, I demonstrate that any system expressive enough to describe its own truth probe creates a paradox. While simple truth probes work surprisingly well on basic cases, they cannot function as universal oracles because self-reference inevitably leads to logical contradictions.
"No definable probe over a model’s representation space can exactly capture truth for any language rich enough to describe that probe and its outputs."
Hubble.md: An Open-Source Notetaking App for You and Your AgentsI built Hubble.md as a free, open-source notepad that works seamlessly for both humans and AI agents. Backed by Markdown and HTML, it offers the familiar writing experience of Notion or Apple Notes while keeping your data in simple, accessible files. Whether you are logging travel notes in Kyoto or cooking recipes at home, this tool ensures your ideas are organized and ready for your digital assistants.
"The same writing experience you're used to from Notion or Apple Notes, backed by Markdown files."
While converting SRT subtitles to WebVTT, I discovered a bug where byte order marks disrupted the file format. My initial manual fix was messy, but using Python's utf-8-sig encoding provided an elegant solution. I then used ripgrep to find and clean up dozens of previously corrupted files in my media library.
"This sort of lesson is exactly why I love managing my local media archives as hand-built static websites – the lo-fi approach gives me lots of opportunities to explore low-level ideas and learn how things actually work on my computer."
I am excited to share the release of Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7, which introduces a new interactive manual module and expands SIMD support for ARM64 and X86-64. This update includes critical bug fixes for compiler errors and miscompilations, alongside performance optimizations for UTF-8 handling and complex number operations. We have also refined documentation and fixed various platform-specific issues to ensure a smoother experience for developers across different architectures.
"The manual can thus be explored interactively in the usual way, and it is browsable with the MGL-PAX library."
Delayed Gratification: The World's First Slow News MagazineWe are proud to be the last to breaking news, offering a quarterly magazine that revisits the past three months with in-depth, independent journalism. In an increasingly frantic world, our publication provides a slower, more reflective look at global events, featuring detailed infographics and thoughtful analysis rather than the rush of 24-hour news cycles.
"It's like if Greenland Sharks made a newspaper."
How the Berkeley Sockets Interface Revolutionized Network AccessI reflect on the 1983 release of Berkeley Standard Distribution 4.2, which introduced the sockets interface and transformed how we connect to networks. Before this, installing UNIX involved slow, error-prone tape transfers and inconsistent protocols like UUCP. By treating network connections as simple files, sockets unified the system, allowing tools like FTP and Telnet to work seamlessly and paving the way for the modern internet.
"In a remarkably short space of time, almost everything that could talk to sockets had been written to talk to sockets, or some kind of shim program that talked to sockets for you."
I discovered that the log function in PHP and Lua breaks mathematical monotonicity in rare cases. This happens because these languages switch between different calculation methods for specific bases like 10 and 2, creating a discontinuity. While other languages like Python and Rust handle this consistently, PHP and Lua's optimization choices lead to unexpected results that confuse developers relying on standard floating-point behavior.
"I like it when people value correctness."
I use RAM as a proxy for computing power to explore the exponential growth of technology from the Apollo Guidance Computer to modern devices like the iPhone. By mapping these machines on a magnitude scale, I highlight how each order of magnitude brings a unique quality to the user experience. This journey also reflects on the community-driven learning ethos of the Recurse Center, where I met my co-host and found inspiration for this exploration of digital history.
"Just remember that every order of magnitude is a big deal, because as we say at Mag World, quantity has a quality all of its own."
I spent three weeks exploring how well Linux and Wayland support multiple mouse cursors on a single desktop. While the core protocol is deeply integrated, support varies across compositors like Weston, sway, and niri, as well as libraries like GTK and SDL. I discovered surprising capabilities for pair programming and gaming, but many pieces of the puzzle remain incomplete. I am sharing tools and open project ideas to help expand this collaborative computing space.
"This style of multi-player computing facilitates collaboration inside of applications very naturally, without the need for complicated synchronization algorithms."
Beyond Greece and Rome: Uncovering a Global Ancient HistoryWe are moving past the narrow focus on classical Greece and Rome to reveal a truly global antiquity. New evidence of trans-Saharan trade, Indian Ocean networks, and connections stretching from Scandinavia to China shows a complex web of exchange across Afro-Eurasia. This shift expands our understanding of the ancient world far beyond the Mediterranean basin.
"Cleopatra is one of the most iconic figures from antiquity, yet she is nearer in time to the present than she was to those first pyramids – by a half-millennium, no less."
60 Years Ago, a Submerged Submarine Circled the Globe for the First TimeIn 1960, the nuclear-powered USS Triton completed Operation Sandblast, becoming the first submarine to circumnavigate the globe entirely underwater. This historic mission proved that nuclear energy allowed submarines to operate indefinitely submerged, shifting naval strategy from surface cruising to deep-water stealth. The vessel traveled over 26,000 nautical miles, demonstrating a new era of naval capability.
"One surprising fact about submarines is that for decades they spent more time on the surface of the ocean than underneath."
Inside Zig's Incremental Compilation: Millisecond Rebuilds for Real AppsAs a Zig core team member, I share how our incremental compilation feature now allows complex applications to rebuild in milliseconds. By caching intermediate representations and modeling dependencies through analysis units, we detect changes at the function level and patch binaries directly. This approach, refined over years, turns what was once a proof-of-concept into a daily tool for the team, drastically speeding up the edit-compile-test loop.
"Today, using Zig's incremental compilation, you can make changes to real, complex applications in a matter of milliseconds."
I am announcing the end of the iPhone Upgrade Program to introduce Apple Upgrade, a more flexible leasing option for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches. Current members can continue their monthly payments without interruption or choose to switch to the new program when ready. This change offers better value and a seamless experience while ensuring your AppleCare coverage remains active throughout your term.
"Let farewell lead you to your next hello."
I discuss the launch of Opus 5 and how we built Claude Code by deleting 80% of our system prompt. We explore solving prompt injection, the concept of product overhang, and why developers should give AI harder problems. As capabilities accelerate, I argue that coding is nearly solved and prompt engineering is fundamentally changing.
"Press delete on your AI product and rebuild it from scratch."
Meet UNA: A Repairable, Modular GPS Watch with USB-C and Open SDKWe built UNA to challenge the throwaway culture of smartwatches. Our modular GPS watch features a user-replaceable battery, universal USB-C charging, and an open SDK for custom development. Designed in Scotland, UNA allows you to repair, upgrade, and fully own your device, ensuring it lasts for years rather than months.
"When one part fails, the whole watch shouldn't."
Now Is the Time to Give LLMs Access to the ACM Digital LibraryI argue that the ACM Digital Library should immediately grant Large Language Models access to its vast repository of computer science research. This move is essential to ensure AI systems are trained on accurate, high-quality technical data rather than noisy internet content. By enabling this access, we can foster more reliable AI tools that genuinely advance the field of computing.
"The future of reliable AI depends on training models with the rigorous, peer-reviewed knowledge found in the ACM Digital Library."
Using Claude Mythos Preview, we found significant mathematical flaws in the HAWK post-quantum signature scheme and a weaker version of AES. These autonomous discoveries cut HAWK's key strength in half and sped up AES attacks by hundreds of times. While no current production systems are affected, this research demonstrates how frontier AI models can stress-test cryptographic algorithms to build more secure digital infrastructure.
"Despite HAWK having survived two rounds of expert human review over a period of two years, Mythos was able to improve the best-known attack on it in just 60 hours of work—effectively cutting its key strength in half."
Lightweight Spring Boot Monitoring Without Prometheus and GrafanaI built StatLite to offer a simple dashboard for monitoring a few Spring Boot services on a single VPS. Instead of running a heavy stack like Prometheus and Grafana, this single Go binary reads your existing Actuator endpoints to track health, errors, and latency. It stores history in SQLite, giving you the operational visibility you need without the complexity of a full observability platform.
"You may not need a complete monitoring platform to answer those questions."